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The Goblin Market is a long-time side project of Green Pajamas members Laura Weller and Jeff Kelly. The music draws inspiration from both art and literature. The duo’s third and latest album, Beneath Far Gondal’s Foreign Sky, takes another foray into 19th century England with a focus on the work of the Bronte sisters. The songs focus primarily on Emily, author of Wuthering Heights as well as numerous poems, many of which the subject is the imaginary land of Gondal, a place conceived by Emily in her youth.

The songs on their first album, Ghostland, focused on 19th century England, including Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry. In fact, the name Goblin Market comes from the famous Christina Rossetti poem written at the height of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Their second record, Haunted, featured songs inspired by the writings of American author Joyce Carol Oates, especially her more “gothic” short stories and novels.

True confessions of a Brontëmaniac
Kate Bush. I blame her for my Brontë sisters fixation. Well – actually I guess it was, in truth, my wife. We were in the car, listening to Wuthering Heights and I was saying – man, what a great song. Susanne said: “Have you ever read the book?”
I said, no.
“Oh my god, Jeff. You absolutely have to read that book!”
And that was the start.
But I think the first book I read in this regard was The Brontë Story by Margaret Lane, a biography based around Mrs. Gaskell famous The Life of Charlotte Brontë. This is where it first started getting interesting for me.
The family’s story is as fascinating as the fiction they wrote and one tends to find oneself, via the diaries, letters, recollections by others, poems and, ultimately, their fiction, in a very…voyeuristic position. You start to really get to know these girls; you see them running from a storm blowing hard off the moor; Emily in the kitchen making bread; playing their – as Charlotte called them – “bed games” and living in their imaginary worlds of Glass Town, Angria, Gondal.
You feel close to them as they are growing up; you see them pace by the fire, reading each other the latest chapters of their works in progress – Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Anne’s, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – as the rain pours on the gravestones just outside the front window. One gains a vivid mental image of Emily, coming into the Black Bull inn each night to collect her troubled brother, Branwell, and walk him – probably more like carry him – home.

Their lives are well documented and yet…there is the stuff that never got written down. And that presents to us an enduring mystery: What happened in those minutes and hours and days in between?

Like many before me, I became obsessed with the Brontës, especially Emily, who became, truly, an infatuation. As I read Wuthering Heights, I found myself thinking of what she may have been thinking while she wrote down the lines. What she was wearing while she wrote them down. I imagined her in her small room, writing her musical poems as the night wind “waved her hair.”
I learned that Charlotte later edited her manuscript poems for publication, which I found extremely annoying; how could one hope to go in and “fix” such beautiful language? (In setting her poems, I have only ever used the original manuscript versions.)
I wondered what she looked like in real life, when she smiled or cried. How her skin smelled, her hair felt. I wanted to get in a time machine and go back there. I imagined what it might have been like, walking along a dirt road and suddenly coming upon Emily and Charlotte, two anonymous girls in their little carriage, on a day trip to Leeds.

The strange thing is, I slowly started to realize that there were thousands of others just like me. Obsessed.

Imagine then my shock while in 1999 touring their home, now a museum, and seeing an actual lock of Emily’s hair! (It had been cut off to save, in the tradition of the time, shortly after her death.)
I kept going back to that room, that glass case and looking again and again. She was real, not some mythical thing I had dreamed up. I was hesitant to finally leave.

Hence my song, The Lock:

A piece of you, there is a lock
Nothing more and nothing less
It blew wild in the moorland rain
Felt your sister’s caress

The lonely nights above the graves
It brushed against your face
And if I could I’d take it
Steal it from this case

And if I could, I’d kiss it and hide it away
So that no one was as close to you as me

Still this song is not completely autobiographical. I like to think of it as an homage in a way, to the others who suffer from acute brontëmania, some afflicted with the disease far worse than me, destined to suffer a lifetime.
And it is also a tribute to Emily who, in Wuthering Heights, wrote about obsession in a frightful manner. She, I think, was one of us.

I could carry on and on about the beautiful prose of Jane Eyre, the unimaginable heartbreak of Patrick Brontë’s long outliving his wife and all six children, the breathtaking beauty of Haworth moor and the joy of drinking a pint with my family in the very Black Bull inn where Branwell got shit-faced every night. And the truly otherworldly quality of Wuthering Heights, the only book I’ve ever read twice.
And I will happily do so if you corner me in a bar sometime and say, tell me about the Brontës.
Suffice to say, this new record is Laura’s and my very humble tribute to some very shy sisters who – as it turns out – just so happened to change fucking everything. They were the foundation of the gothic revival in literature: the virginal Charlotte and Emily imagining and then writing down the two greatest romances of all time – Charlotte in her refined and perfect language, Emily, in her sensual and queer… Plainly, there is truly nothing else like Wuthering Heights.

Luckily, Charlotte lived to see the success of Jane Eyre though she would of course never know its great influence.
Emily died on the parsonage sofa at 29 years old, never even to begin to imagine, in that December of 1848, the success of her novel or how it would affect so much and so many, right up to this day.

First off, about this Goblin Market thing. I get that Jeff Kelly and Laura Weller probably started this side project of Green Pajamas thinking that they wanted to distance themselves from the Pajamas, that the separation would avoid confusion. The thing is, the Pajamas have had this sort of revolving door policy over the years and the separation is not necessary, were it Weller and Kelly or Weller and Joe Ross or any other combination of Pajamadom. There is something about the Pajamas which makes any combination of members a moot point. They are Pajamas and that is all there is to it. And being Pajamas, they can do no wrong, to these ears.

Having become reacquainted with the Pajamas after a decade hiatus, I am slowly working my way through the various albums released by the various incarnations of the band. There are tons of them and I am slowly wondering what the hell happened. I am hearing nothing but outstanding music and I know the band has gotten its share of attention and probably sales, and yet I hear very little on the street. My street, anyway. As Shakespeare would have said had he lived today, “There is something rotten in the state of musicdom, M’lord.”

Rotten indeed, and it ain’t the music. It’s the industry. And the present. The music is better than ever and I am going mad trying to figure out how to spread the word— any word— about the best of it. Welcome to the Goblin Market, my friends, because if this isn’t among the best, there simply is no best. And, yes, it does sound like the Pajamas. How could it not? Kelly and Weller are two very integral parts of that band. If maybe that revolving door did not exist… but it does.

This time around, Weller and Kelly dip into the world of the Bronte sisters, Emily and Charlotte. Oh, the things I didn’t know. Emily died at thirty years of age. Did you know that? And she’s dead (the result of having died). I think her sister Charlotte is as well, too. The things you learn on the Net.

One thing I did learn and am glad for the knowledge: Goblin Market‘s previous offerings, Ghostland (2001) and Haunted (2005) used as inspiration, respectively, the Bronte’s and Joyce Carol Oates. I love Joyce Carol Oates. I think it was when I read that that it became clear to me that Goblin Market is as much about the direction as the music. You can hear it on the new album. It is a bit darker than regular Pajama offerings, a bit more orchestral and maybe a bit more somber.

And yet there are highs. The chorus on Remembrance, powered by vocal harmonies and a full organ sound. The total Pop chord progression (and the interplay of piano and guitar) on The Night Wind. The guitar plunks reminiscent of Blue Oyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper on Song (The Linnet In the Rocky Dells). The outstanding segue between Song and the also outstanding High Waving Heather, with chorus straight out of the Pajamas’ playbook.

The lows? There are no lows, rather quieter and more introspective songs. I struggle to separate the obvious (what I consider) Brit-influenced Pop sounds from the more flowing orchestral segments. They are a roller coaster of sound, one flowing into the other just as they should. It is this constant flow and ebb of the tide which really makes the album. Separate them and you hear the songs, but allow them to flow and you hear the music. You know how when you heard Sgt. Pepper the tenth or twelfth time and realized how the sequencing of the songs made them that much better? Ditto, Beneath Far Gondal’s Foreign Sky.

Weller and Kelly put a lot into this album. You can tell. In places, it is majestic. In others, haunting. In still others, almost joyful. But always it is Weller and Kelly, with the ghosts of the Bronte’s hovering close by. They nailed this one. I give it an A with an A+ for effort. Because albums this good don’t just happen. They are created.

Frank O. Gutch Jr

http://rockandreprise.net/goblinmarket.html

I’ve established with previous posts that the Green Pajamas are glorious, and are frankly required listening for anyone who claims to love guitar based pop/rock. The word genius may have been used.
I lack the necessary education to work out a way to scientifically prove this yet, but I’m convinced that it’s is fact and not merely opinion.
Naturally the same goes for their equally under-appreciated side project the Goblin Market. Where the Green Pajamas act as a perfect distillation of Jeff Kelly’s unerring pop smarts, the Goblin Market allows Kelly and Laura Weller the opportunity to approach things from a more subtle and cerebral vantage point. But Don’t let me give you the impression that this is just Green Pajamas without the choruses. Their recently released third effort, Beneath Far Gondal’s Foreign Sky is a thing of often exquisite beauty.
As with previous Goblin Market releases this has a unifying theme, the works of the Bronte sisters in this case. They’ve referenced them before, on their first album Ghostland from 2001, and the Green Pajama’s 1999 album Seven Fathoms Down and Falling, but this is the first time they’ve fully immersed themselves in the subject. The expanded and varied instrumentation they utilize here allows all of the drama and melancholy of the source material the opportunity to shine.
Weller and Kelly’s voices entwine on Tell Me Tell Me Smiling Child in a lovely fashion, against a backdrop of delicate piano with tasteful harp and string embellishments.
If This Be All is captivating, with a hypnotic instrumental coda of arpeggiated guitars and lush strings.
High Waving Heather, revisited from the Seven Fathoms Down album, should sound totally out of place with it’s hooky chorus and burbling atmospheric electronic intro, but it’s all credit to the band that their sense of unity here is so strong that this fits in seamlessly. Or perhaps having a background in listening to their records has made me more open to expecting the unexpected.
Either way this is an experience I would wholeheartedly recommend. Get going on this now and you’ll be anticipating Death By Misadventure, the upcoming Green Pajamas album just as keenly as I am.

We present today a work of love, a musical album inspired by the poems of the Brontës, particularly but not only, Emily Brontë:

The Goblin Market is a long-time side project of Green Pajamas members Laura Weller and Jeff Kelly. The music draws inspiration from both art and literature. The duo’s third and latest album, Beneath Far Gondal’s Foreign Sky, takes another foray into 19th century England with a focus on the work of the Bronte sisters. The songs focus primarily on Emily, author of Wuthering Heights as well as numerous poems, many of which the subject is the imaginary land of Gondal, a place conceived by Emily in her youth.
The songs on their first album, Ghostland, focused on 19th century England, including Pre-Raphaelite art and poetry. In fact, the name Goblin Market comes from the famous Christina Rossetti poem written at the height of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Their second record, Haunted, featured songs inspired by the writings of American author Joyce Carol Oates, especially her more “gothic” short stories and novels.

Jeff Kelly

Laura Weller

Submissions

If you want to send us stuff to consider, you can. We don’t take on a lot of new projects, but are open minded. Please listen to some of our stuff and see if you think you’d fit in. We generally prefer you just use the Contact Us link and send MP3s and some info, but you can mail us stuff at:

Green Monkey Records LLC
PO Box 13494Olympia WA 98508

We will usually give you some kind of feedback, but no promises there.